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Courtesy of The Codex Group

As of December, 2012, nearly two-thirds of frequent book buyers have e-readers or tablets. Codex defines frequent book buyers as those who buy books at least monthly. These buyers who represent about one-fifth of adults (43mm) buy nearly four-fifths of all books (79%).

Book Buyers With eReaders or Tablets Behave Differently

Not surprisingly, buyers with eReaders or tablets are much less likely to discover books in physical stores (16% vs. 27% of non-owners). They are twice as likely to discover books digitally (20% vs. 10% of non-owners). And non-fiction accounts for only half as much of eBook sales as physical books (21% vs. 42%).

Finally, eBooks are more likely to be discovered online than print books. While under a third of people who visit an online book retailer to buy a print book discover a book there, half of those who visit an online retailer to buy an ebook discover it on the site.

Big Stores Are Contributing Less To Discovery

In June of 2010, nearly a third (32%) of frequent book buyers said they’d found their last book at a physical store. By December of 2012, only a fifth of purchasers said the same thing.

The cause of this change wasn’t driven by independent bookstores going out of business, either. The number of bookstores has declined only fractionally over the past two decades from 12,363 in 1997 to 10,800 in 2012. A bigger cause is the collapse of Borders and a shift in the merchandising strategy of Barnes & Noble and other big book retailers away from books into gifts, toys and other specialty items.

Online Booksellers Have Not Picked Up The Slack

Even as discovery from physical stores has dropped, the percentage who say they found their book in an online store has barely budged from 6.2% to 6.6%. Where are frequent buyers finding their new books? The biggest single increase was personal recommendation, which increased by nearly a third. Personal recommendations now account for 19% of book discovery – on par with bookstores at 20%.

Most Personal Recommendations are Still Made Face to Face

Of these personal recommendations, over four-fifths were made in person. Six percent were made on the phone and just five percent through social media including Facebook.

This does not necessarily prove that social media is ineffective. Marketers know that purchases are often driven by repeated exposure to a brand, which is enabled by a personal recommendation. If you’ve seen a particular book mentioned a dozen times on Facebook and then a friend recommends it to you in person, you are more likely to purchase it because you are more likely to remember the author or title at the point of purchase.

Traditional, online and social media are all valid ways to increase the familiarity of a book or author. Accurately parsing their role in the purchase process might be better done through observational research.

What we see today in a publishing environment undergoing disruptive change is a chaotic world in which “rules” about discoverability are almost totally unreliable. At the moment, online book discovery is very much caught up in a familiar online “latest thing” world. The Harlem Shake was nothing three weeks ago and now it’s dominating YouTube, but Gangnam Style is dead. It’s the same thing with online book publicity formulas.

This finding has received the most press, and has evoked the strongest reactions. 48% of frequent book buyers visited online sites with a specific author or topic in mind. Of the 52% of consumers visiting etailers who discovered their book on the site, a third found that book from bestseller or other lists, 23% from price or other promotions and just under a fifth (19%) from the “also bought” feature. Surprisingly, browsing accounted for less than 6% of the books discovered on online retailers.